Why RFK Jr.’s measles interview has Canadian experts alarmed

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Measles cases are rising in Canada, the country’s chief public health officer is urging people to get vaccinated, and Ontario is dealing with an ongoing “multi-jurisdictional outbreak.” As of March 12, a total of 372 cases (277 confirmed, 95 probable) from 11 public health units have been reported in Ontario that are associated with an outbreak that began last October. Thirty-one people required hospitalization. Thirty were unvaccinated, 27 of whom were children, including one child who needed intensive care, Public Health Ontario reported Thursday.

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The numbers are alarming but not surprising, said Dr. Mansour Haeryfar, president of the Canadian Society for Immunology. “COVID-related immunization delays, vaccine hesitancy and the relative ease of international travel may have introduced vulnerable pockets among many communities.”

During a recent interview with Fox News at a Florida Steak N’ Shake outlet, and amidst rising cases of measles globally, America’s top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year” as well as “all the diseases that measles itself causes.”

Long a vaccine skeptic who now oversees the U.S. public health system, Kennedy also recently remarked that it’s exceedingly difficult for measles to kill a healthy person and, while he is encouraging people to get vaccinated, he has also suggested vaccine-induced immunity wanes faster than scientists say it does.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses known to man, and Kennedy’s comments have experts rattled. “Will RFK’s vaccine agenda make America contagious again,” asks a Nature headline. Rolling Stone described the Fox Interview as “bonkers.”

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Haeryfar, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, McGill University professor of medicine Dr. Brian Ward and McMaster University immunologist Dawn Bowdish helped National Post deconstruct some of the statements Kennedy made in his recent interviews with Fox. Haeryfar and Ward (who is travelling) responded via email.

Kennedy: We have measles outbreaks every year and part of that is that there are people who don’t vaccinate. But also the vaccine itself wanes. The vaccine wanes about 4.5 per cent per year. So that means older people are essentially unvaccinated. Their immune system is not protected. And one of the problems is that tends to shift measles infections to older groups and also to very young children. It used to be, when you and I were kids, everybody got measles. And measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life but many people it wanes.

Haeryfar: This is not accurate! After we receive immunizations, we develop antibodies that can protect us against future infections. It is true that detectable antibody levels can gradually decline over time in some individuals. However, this is not equal to waning “immunity” because vaccination (or infections) generates immune memory cells that last a very long time, if not forever, in our body. Older people have a large pool of memory cells in their immune cell repertoire. Two doses of the vaccine can afford protection against measles in about 97 per cent of people for decades, if not for life.

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Ward: Although some people still deny this, immunity after vaccination probably does wane slowly in the absence of exposures to natural infection. It’s called “secondary vaccine failure” and it may occur at a rate as high as five per cent per DECADE (not 4.5 per cent per year!).

Bowdish: If there was this massive waning, we would be seeing outbreaks or infections occurring in people born in the ’70s and ’80s (publicly funded, one-dose vaccination programs were introduced in the 1970s). That’s not what we see. What we see is that almost all the cases are in young people who are not vaccinated or who had one vaccine. (The combined MMR — measles-mumps-rubella — vaccine is given in two doses.)

Kennedy: One of the problems is (the vaccine) does not appear to provide maternal immunity. It used to be, in very young kids — you don’t want a one-year-old kid getting measles, that’s very dangerous — they were protected by breast milk and by maternal immunity. Women who get vaccinated do not provide that level of maternal immunity that the natural measles infection did. So you’re now seeing measles hit very, very young kids and hitting older people within whom the vaccine has waned. And that is something that we need to worry about and we’re looking at at HHS.

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Haeryfar: Both vaccination and natural infection give rise to a class of antibodies that can cross the placenta to provide protection against measles. After vaccination or infection, a different class of antibodies is also found in the breast milk and contributes to anti-measles immunity in infants born to vaccinated mothers. This is called “passive immunity” since the immune system of the fetus/infant does not actively participate in antibody production. While efficient, passive immunity is only temporary and protects the infant only for a few months, since the transferred antibodies gradually disappear. Therefore, it makes sense that the first dose of the MMR vaccines is recommended at 11 to 12 months of age, after such antibodies degrade. It is true that antibody levels after vaccination may not be as high as those found after natural infection. However, they are extremely effective. So, high infection rates in “very, very young kids” is likely a reflection of the time period in which maternal antibodies have disappeared when a vaccine has yet to be introduced.

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Bowdish: Measles has always been an infection of very young children. It has always been something that was particularly dangerous in young children and there is no shift. If an unvaccinated woman is exposed to measles during pregnancy, it can result in birth defects, still births, spontaneous miscarriages, developmental delays, blindness, deafness and neurological conditions in the babies. One of the things I’m particularly worried about is when this whole measles-autism scandal started in the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was a noticeable dip in parents vaccinating their kids. One 2013 study in Canada suggested that about 10 per cent of young people who were born in that era don’t seem to have any detectable immunity to measles. If you do the math, those are the young people who would now, may be thinking about starting a family. My big worry is that with all these outbreaks, we’re going to start seeing loss of pregnancies or birth defects due to measles in this particularly vulnerable group who are now reaching baby-having age.

Kennedy: We’re providing vaccines. Anybody who wants a vaccine can get one and we will make sure of that…. I’m a freedom of choice person. We should have transparency; we should have informed choice. But if people don’t want it the government shouldn’t force them to do it. There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes — encephalitis, blindness, etcetera. And so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves. And what we need to do is give them the best information. Encourage them to vaccinate. The vaccine does stop the spread of the disease.

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Ward: No vaccine is 100 per cent safe and the adverse events discussion can rapidly get very dangerous. Any intelligent discussion HAS TO focus on danger of vaccine versus danger of disease, and not danger of vaccine versus nothing. Rare cases of post-vaccination encephalomyelitis (swelling of the brain that can lead to permanent neurological deficits) do occur at a rate of possibly one per million. Of course, the risk of the same complication is one per 1,000 with natural infection, so orders of magnitude higher.

Bowdish: There have been case reports of very, very, very, like, exceedingly rare cases where someone has an undiagnosed immunodeficiency and they have a really strong reaction to the vaccine because it’s an attenuated virus, meaning a weak version of the virus. In Canada and the U.S. those are caught way before a person would ever be vaccinated.

(In an interview with Stat News, infectious disease specialist Dr. Daniel Griffin said the MMR vaccine “has never been found to cause a death in an immunocompetent patient.” And blindness? One 2016 study reported that six cases of optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve that can lead to vision loss or temporary blindness, following an MMR vaccination had been reported over the previous 30 years. The complication may be due to a “toxic reaction to the non-viral component of the vaccine,” researchers reported. It can also occur in measles patients who develop encephalitis.)

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Kennedy: It’s exceedingly difficult for measles to kill a healthy individual.… We see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or don’t have a good exercise program.

Bowdish: Malnutrition is frankly true for any infectious disease. If you don’t have biological reserves, you don’t do well with any infection, measles being one of them. But measles kills the healthiest people alive. There are plenty of perfectly healthy children who are fit, active, well-nourished and who die or are permanently damaged by measles.

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